These Yellow Sands
Seaside England. By Ruth Manning-Sanders. (Batsford. iss.) Ttie shades of the founders of the seaside cult—the medical men, Floyer, Wittie, Baynard, Russell, who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries advocated the, at first, dual sacrament of sea- drinking and sea-bathing--must surely be gratified by the recent growth of a whole corpus of ritual histories. Miss Manning- Sanders's is at least the fifth book about English holidays and the seaside to appear since the war. It is perhaps the best. It avoids the acute facetiousness which the subject seems to impose on some writers, and yet its thorough study of the development of the seaside habit is as lighthearted as that annual excursion has come to be, now that the arduoin medicinal observances of its early years are almost forgotten.
Miss Manning-Sanders comments ably upon the canon of the medical founders ; and in deteribing how all round our island coastal fishing villages transformed themselves into " resorts," after the pattern of the earlier inland spas, to accommodate what seemed, by the beginning or the nineteenth century, the whole population thirsting to "rush into the sea," she mingles gaiety with valuable social history. One might object that she does not, even for the teeming Victorian years, dig far below the level of the prosperous middle-class holidaymaker ; and she hardly lays enough stress on the connection between the spreading of the railways and the opening up, for holiday purposes, of new tracts of coastline. But her account of the habits and costumes of two centuries of bathers is the most comprehentive yet. In her reading, she has scooped into her net several new seashore specimens. She has found. for instance, an admirable source-book in the late-Victorian Spon's Household Manual, with its unfeeling remark that " bathing-dresses for matrons may be made in almost any style, however elaborate or heavy."
In dealing with the first revelation of the bathing-machine, Miss Manning-Sanders skirts warily round the notorious pitfalls of the Setterington Heresy. (Dissenters from the general be'ief that the Quaker. Benjamin Beale of Margate. in 1753, conceived the idea of the first machine, base their claim for its earlier manifestation. in the north, on an engraving by Setterington of the Scarborough beach in 1736. But the wheeled sentry-box there depicted is by no means the high, horse-drawn, seagoing vessel which crowded our shores from Beale's time almost up to the period of the 1914 war.)
The iconography of the earliest seaside epoch is necessarily restricted and by now stimewhat cigid. but the obvious, has here been skilfully avoided, and the illustrations are soecially rich for the later Victorian and fdwardian periods. Though it may be argued that all fashions Aiming from Paris, it is not qui'e playing the game, in a book witte this title; to include as an indication of children's beach costumes- of the 'seventies a plate whibh is mani- festly French, from its alien-type tents and beach-huts to a child's
Previous page
